Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1866 - 8.2.1. The form-urlencoded Media Type

Top: Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
Up: Requests For Comments
Up: RFC 1866
Up: 8. Forms
Up: 8.2. Form Submission
Prev: 8.2. Form Submission
Next: 8.2.2. Query Forms: METHOD=GET

### 8.2.1. The form-urlencoded Media Type

The default encoding for all forms is `application/x-www-form- urlencoded'. A form data set is represented in this media type as follows:

1. The form field names and values are escaped: space characters are replaced by `+', and then reserved characters are escaped as per [URL]; that is, non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by `%HH', a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII code of the character. Line breaks, as in multi-line text field values, are represented as CR LF pairs, i.e. `%0D%0A'.

2. The fields are listed in the order they appear in the document with the name separated from the value by `=' and the pairs separated from each other by `&'. Fields with null values may be omitted. In particular, unselected radio buttons and checkboxes should not appear in the encoded data, but hidden fields with VALUE attributes present should.

   NOTE - The URI from a query form submission can be used in a normal anchor style hyperlink. Unfortunately, the use of the `&' character to separate form fields interacts with its use in SGML attribute values as an entity reference delimiter. For example, the URI `http://host/?x=1&y=2' must be written `<a href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"' or `<a href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">'.

   HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI implementors are encouraged to support the use of `;' in place of `&' to save users the trouble of escaping `&' characters this way.

Next: 8.2.2. Query Forms: METHOD=GET

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1866 - 8.2.1. The form-urlencoded Media Type